Misheck Masamvu, Safety Pin
28 January - 01 March 2023
Goodman Gallery, Cape Town

Goodman Gallery presents Safety Pin, an exhibition of new paintings and a sculptural installation by Misheck Masamvu. The artist combines striking colour with a distinct expressionist style to create tumultuous landscapes, representing the confessional vulnerability that lies at the heart of his practice. 

Safety Pin uses intergenerational relationships as the primary source with an emphasis on maternal links. Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, the exhibition also addresses the past while searching for a way of being present - with dignity - in this world. 

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Misheck Masamvu at the 5th Aichi Triennale
'STILL ALIVE' 
30 July – 10 October 2022

Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, Misheck Masamvuʼs works allow him to address the past while searching for a way of being in the world. His layered painted surfaces and brushstrokes, which are almost visceral, exist as remnants of the physical act of painting giving the sense that multiple temporalities have been included in one picture plane. Beneath the surface of a painted image, an infinity of others exist. Through abstraction, Masamvuʼs figures appear in the midst of metamorphosis, absorbed by teeming landscapes.

Masamvu created these paintings during the global lockdowns. Forced immobility created internal conflicts which are expressed in the works. The canvasses appear to convulse, as if caught in the act of mutation. This act of synchronous change and entanglement is evident through the extensive use of line and weaving together of brilliant colour. The result is images that are not immediately apparent, rather cloaked in layers of camouflage that invite the viewer to drum out images in their own mind. The lack of exacting definition from Masamvuʼs expressive mark making establishes an honest conversation between the artist and the viewer, an invitation to experience his shifting visual lexicon, and a prompt to delve into Masamvuʼs own personal layers of history. Collectively, this pushes the viewer to become conscious of their own conflicts.

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Talk to me while I'm eating
16 January - 27 February 2021
Goodman Gallery, London

Goodman Gallery presents Talk to me while I’m eating, an exhibition of abstract colour-rich paintings alongside figurative pencil drawings by pioneering Zimbabwean artist Misheck Masamvu. 

Talk to me while I’m eating marks Masamvu’s first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom, bringing a selection of never before exhibited works produced in Harare during 2020 in which the artist continues to unpack the human condition in relation to the natural world.

Masamvu’s brushstrokes exist as remnants of the physical action of painting in which multiple temporalities are included in a single image with several layers of imagery beneath the surface. The outcome is a porous pictorial space, one that moves between representational clarity and  abstract abundance. 

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Carnivorous Words
7 – 18 July 2021
55 Main Stree, East Hamptons, NY

Goodman Gallery East Hampton is pleased to present Carnivorous Words, an exhibition of colour-rich paintings by pioneering Zimbabwean artist Misheck Masamvu.

Carnivorous Words marks Masamvu’s first solo exhibition in the United States, and follows his participation in Witness: Afro Perspectives from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection, a group exhibition at El Espacio 23, and Allied with Power at the Pérez Art Museum in Miami.

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8th Biennial of Painting: The ‘t’ is Silent
Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle, Belgium
Date: June 26 – October 2, 2022

Painting, historically regarded as the ‘royal road’ of artistic practice, has over the centuries meant that the art form, alongside drawing, served as a foundation for artistic education, where such education was available. The history of western art pedagogy in colonised places across the world often reveals that the colonial government’s rule was indirectly played out in how formal artistic pedagogies were organised. The recent calls for decolonial education around the world – fuelled by the Black Lives Matter and other affiliated movements , as well as the pandemic – have inspired reconsiderations of the human condition and the politics of care. At the same time, these social movements have coincided with a new rise in representational painting that has been critiqued, in the words of artist Olu Oguibe, as “jolly, no-worries, all sunshine and flowers, ebullient wealthy middle-class representation of Blackness…”

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Life Sentence
03.14.14–03.05.14
blank projects

blank projects is pleased to present Life Sentence, an exhibition of new paintings by Misheck Masamvu.

Following Epitaph, his first exhibition at blank projects in 2012, Life Sentence continues to reflect on the fraught political and social situation of the artist’s home country, Zimbabwe.

Produced in oils with vigorous brush strokes and intense colors, the paintings depict figures and chimeras, often disfigured and degraded, which seem at time to be trapped in bold colour fields resembling abstracted landscapes or mobs of imagined spectators. In other paintings the background comes to the fore and individual figures subtly shift into focus, playing out ironically absurd scenarios that reflect on the psychosocial and political realities of present day Zimbabwe.
Masamvu’s palette is equally uneasy and combative, combining patches of bright primary colours with acidic tones and monochrome scrawl, the surfaces scratched raw by dry brushes or left untreated with seeming disregard which belies a confidence in the formal execution of these works.

Masamvu is of a generation of Zimbabwean painters born at the moment the country gained its independence. Growing up together with the new government, he has and continues to bear witness to Zimbabwe’s struggle for stability and social cohesion. His practice addresses this struggle, revealing a tension between opposing forces, evident in both the compositional elements and the subject matter of his paintings.

According to the artist, “the works attempt to reconcile the notion of freedom in relation to applied statutes. However, the quest to resolve the injustice presiding over the constituency tha shapes Life Sentence selectively reveals the theatre in question. It is staged, performed by an audience hypnotized, dressed in lab rat costumes. I have witnesse our struggle in preparing to play host to new ideas, culpable or inflicted. Once those in power regard our existence as raw material, our lives become relevant as servitude to their tenure. The same speech will be repeated until the walls of resistance are broken down, and their words become fact: the adoration of needles and haystacks where presidents are hand-picked. Why are we celebrating freedom? Whose freedom are we commemorating when we are decorating our chest with the ghost-teeth of fallen heroes?”

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